1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for receiving and printing resources on a website stored on a Web server.
2. Description of the Related Art
These days, many information devices are connected to a network and various applications are performed. The popularization of the World Wide Web (WWW) in particular has been remarkable. Web servers on the Internet or an intranet provide various information, the content of which is updated daily. Users generally browse information by operating software (Web browsers) for accessing these Web servers using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) on a PC or the like. Further, information browsed with a Web browser is often sent to a printer and printed out on paper for reading.
However, performing operations of launching a Web browser, acquiring information and instructing a printer to print is troublesome. To solve this problem, configurations have been proposed in which the printer itself is connected to the network, and Web pages specified in advance are periodically acquired and printed out. Many of these are also designed to prevent the same document being printed repeatedly.
As an example of resolving the above mentioned problem, a known document output apparatus checks the update date and time of a specified Web page and prints the Web page if the Web page has been updated since it was last printed (e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-194984).
On the other hand, an increasing number of sites syndicate (distribute) update information and the like of the site using data in an XML format such as ATOM or a version of RSS. RSS is disclosed in the “RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0” by Dan Brickley and ten other authors, [online] May 30, 2001, RSS-DEV Working Group. Atom is disclosed in “The Atom Syndication Format draft-ietf-atompub-froamat-03” edited by M. Nottingham, R. Sayre, [online] Oct. 20, 2004, RSS-DEV Working Group.
With conventional proposals such as the one shown in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-194984, printing is performed after judging whether or not a specified page has been updated. Consequently, application is difficult in sites where new information is sequentially added as separate files. With many news sites, for example, separate files are added with a different URL for each article, making it impossible to periodically output update information for these sites.